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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Cityhood meeting recap

Creative Loafing has a summary of the May 6 meeting on cityhood information meeting:

Close to 300 DeKalb County residents filed into the Clairmont Hills Baptist Church last night to hear lawmakers and community activists discuss the county's growing cityhood movement.

Many citizens have remained up in arms over the past few months as community groups have introduced a flurry of new city plans. Cartographers have liberally carved out borders that, on occasion, clash with other proposals for potential cities such as Lakeside, Briarcliff, Druid Hills, and LaVista Hills, and Stonecrest. Read the rest @ Creative Loafing

MANA board attendees report the meeting was very well run by Mary Margaret Oliver, and shared the following "take home" messages:

"For a city to be viable, they need to get 40% of their revenue from commercial. The City of Decatur is now at 80/20 which is why they “need” more commercial revenue. Jason Carter bottom-lined the problem: There just isn’t enough to go around so everyone is fighting over the same turf."

"any new city needs to take over three services from the county at a minimum. Everyone wants land use/zoning. In fact the speaker form Druid Hills said that that is their only issue with De Kalb County and if that could be resolved they would be happy with the status quo."

"The main reasons for seeking cityhood were: Land use, permitting, zoning and parks with schools being a hope for the future."

"The City of Decatur is moving forward with annexing the 2 commercial areas but was vague about it... The representative spoke about how low the commercial % was in COD, how their borders need to be 'straightened out'" but the comments were "vague".